OBITUARY -Margareth Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, who has died following a stroke, was one
of the most influential political figures of the 20th Century.
Her legacy had a profound effect upon the policies of her
successors, both Conservative and Labour, while her radical and
sometimes confrontational approach defined her 11-year period
at No 10.
Her term in office saw thousands of ordinary voters gaining a
stake in society, buying their council houses and eagerly snapping
up shares in the newly privatised industries such as British Gas
and BT.
But her rejection of consensus politics made her a divisive figure
and opposition to her policies and her style of government led
eventually to rebellion inside her party and unrest on the streets.
Father's influence
Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born on 13 October 1925 in
Grantham, Lincolnshire, the daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer,
and his wife, Beatrice.
Her father, a Methodist lay preacher and local councillor, had an
immense influence on her life and the policies she would adopt.
"Well, of course, I just owe almost everything to my own father. I
really do," she said later. "He brought me up to believe all the
things that I do believe."
She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and became
only the third female president of the Oxford University
Conservative Association.
After graduating she moved to Colchester where she worked for a
plastics company and became involved with the local
Conservative Party organisation.
In 1949, she was adopted as the prospective Conservative
candidate for the seat of Dartford in Kent which she fought,
unsuccessfully, in the 1950 and 1951 general elections.
However, she made a significant dent in the Labour majority and,
as the then youngest ever Conservative candidate, attracted a lot
of media attention.
In 1951 she married a divorced businessman, Denis Thatcher,
and began studying for the Bar exams. She qualified as a
barrister in 1953, the year in which her twins Mark and Carol
were born.
She tried, unsuccessfully, to gain selection as a candidate in 1955,
but finally entered Parliament for the safe Conservative seat of
Finchley at the 1959 general election.
Within two years she had been appointed as a junior minister
and, following the Conservative defeat in 1964, was promoted to
the shadow cabinet.
'Milk snatcher'
When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stood down as Conservative leader,
Mrs Thatcher voted for Ted Heath in the 1965 leadership election
and was rewarded with a post as spokeswoman on housing and
land.
She campaigned vigorously for the right of council tenants to buy
their houses and was a constant critic of Labour's policy of high
taxation.
She initially worked as a research chemist before training as a
barrister
When Ted Heath entered Downing Street in 1970, she was
promoted to the cabinet as education secretary with a brief to
implement spending cuts in her department.
One of these resulted in the withdrawal of free school milk for
children aged between seven and 11 which led to bitter attacks
from Labour and a press campaign which dubbed her "Margaret
Thatcher, milk snatcher".
She herself had argued in cabinet against the removal of free
milk. She later wrote: "I learned a valuable lesson. I had incurred
the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political
benefit."
As one of the few high-flying women in politics there was,
inevitably, talk of the possibility that she might, one day, become
prime minister. Similar press speculation surrounded the Labour
minister Shirley Williams.
Margaret Thatcher dismissed the idea. In a TV interview she said
she did not believe that there would be a woman prime minister
in her lifetime.
The Heath government was not to last. Battered by the 1973 oil
crisis, forced to impose a three-day working week and facing a
miners' strike, Edward Heath's administration finally collapsed in
February 1974.
Housewife-politician
Thatcher became shadow environment secretary but, angered by
what she saw as Heath's U-turns on Conservative economic
policy, stood against him for the Tory leadership in 1975.
When she went into Heath's office to tell him her decision, he
did not even bother to look up. "You'll lose," he said. "Good day
to you."
She entered Downing St in 1979 with a mission to shrink the state
and repair the country's finances
To everyone's surprise, she defeated Heath on the first ballot,
forcing his resignation, and she saw off Willie Whitelaw on the
second ballot to become the first woman to lead a major British
political party.
She quickly began to make her mark. A 1976 speech criticising the
repressive policies of the Soviet Union led to a Russian
newspaper dubbing her "the Iron Lady," a title which gave her
much personal pleasure.
Adopting the persona of a housewife-politician who knew what
inflation meant to ordinary families, she challenged the power of
the trades unions whose almost constant industrial action peaked
in the so-called "winter of discontent" in 1979.
As the Callaghan government tottered, the Conservatives rolled
out a poster campaign showing a queue of supposedly
unemployed people under the slogan "Labour Isn't Working".
Jim Callaghan lost a vote of confidence on 28 March 1979. Mrs
Thatcher's no-nonsense views struck a chord with many voters
and the Conservatives won the ensuing general election.
Monetary policies
As prime minister, she was determined to repair the country's
finances by reducing the role of the state and boosting the free
market.
Cutting inflation was central to the government's purpose and it
soon introduced a radical budget of tax and spending cuts.
Bills were introduced to curb union militancy, privatise state
industries and allow council home tenants to buy their houses.
Millions of people who previously had little or no stake in the
economy found themselves being able to own their houses and
buy shares in the former state-owned businesses.
New monetary policies made the City of London one of the most
vibrant and successful financial centres in the world.
Old-style manufacturing, which critics complained was creating
an industrial wasteland, was run down in the quest for a
competitive new Britain. Unemployment rose above three million.
There was considerable unrest among the so called "wets" on the
Conservative back benches and that, coupled with riots in some
inner city areas, saw pressure on Margaret Thatcher to modify
her policies.
But the prime minister refused to crumble. She told the 1980
party conference: "To those waiting with bated breath for that
favourite media catch phrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to
say. You turn if you want to... the lady's not for turning."
Falklands War
By late 1981 her approval rating had fallen to 25%, the lowest
recorded for any prime minister until that time, but the
economic corner had been turned.
In early 1982 the economy began to recover and, with it, the
prime minister's standing among the electorate.
Her popularity received its biggest boost in April 1982 with her
decisive response to the Argentine invasion of the Falkland
Islands.
The prime minister immediately despatched a naval task force
and the islands were retaken on 14 June when the Argentine
forces surrendered.
Victory in the Falklands, together with disarray in the Labour
Party, now led by Michael Foot, ensured a Conservative landslide
in the 1983 election.
The following spring the National Union of Mineworkers called a
nationwide strike, despite the failure of their firebrand president,
Arthur Scargill, to ballot his members.
Margaret Thatcher was determined not to falter. Unlike the
situation Edward Heath faced in 1973, the government had built
up substantial stocks of coal at power stations in advance of the
industrial action.
Third term
There were brutal clashes between pickets and police but the
strike eventually collapsed the following March. Many mining
communities never recovered from the dispute that hastened the
decline of the coal industry.
In Northern Ireland, Mrs Thatcher faced down IRA hunger
strikers, though her hard-line approach infuriated even moderate
nationalist opinion and critics claimed it drove many young
Catholics towards the path of violence.
She narrowly escaped death in an IRA attack on her Brighton
hotel in 1984
Although she attempted to ease sectarian tensions, offering
Dublin a role, peace efforts collapsed beneath the weight of
Unionist opposition.
In October 1984, an IRA bomb exploded in the Conservative
conference hotel in Brighton. Five people died and many others,
including cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, were seriously injured.
Characteristically, the prime minister insisted on delivering a
typically robust response in her keynote conference speech a few
hours later.
"This attack has failed. All attempts to destroy democracy by
terrorism will fail."
Her foreign policy was aimed at building up the profile of the UK
abroad, something she believed had been allowed to decline
under previous Labour administrations.
She found a soulmate in the US president, Ronald Reagan, who
shared many of her economic views, and she struck up an
unlikely alliance with Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming Soviet
president. "We can do business together," she famously said.
Labour, now led by Neil Kinnock, had still not recovered from
years of in-fighting and Mrs Thatcher won an unprecedented
third term at the 1987 general election.
One of her first actions was to introduce the poll tax or
community charge, a flat-rate tax for local services which was
based on individuals rather than the value of the property in
which they lived.
'Treachery with a smile'
It sparked some of the worst street violence in living memory.
Tory MPs, alarmed that the tax could cost them their seats, saw
no way of getting rid of it so long as Margaret Thatcher was in
charge.
She easily survived a leadership challenge from an unknown
back-bencher in 1989 but the challenge was just a symptom of
increasing dissatisfaction among Conservative MPs over her
policies.
It was the issue of Europe which, eventually, brought about her
downfall.
Returning from a fractious Euro summit in Rome, she let rip
against her European counterparts, refusing to countenance any
increase in the power of the European Community and outraging
many colleagues.
She shed tears upon leaving office in 1990
"The President of the Commission, Monsieur Delors, said at a
press conference the other day that he wanted the European
Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he
wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the
Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No."
Sir Geoffrey Howe, resentful since being ousted as foreign
secretary, seized his moment to quit the cabinet, deliver a
devastating resignation speech and invite challengers for the
leadership.
The following day, Michael Heseltine threw his hat into the ring.
Falling two votes short of preventing the contest going to a
second round, Margaret Thatcher declared she would fight on.
Told by close colleagues, the famous "men in grey suits," that
she would lose, she used her next cabinet meeting to announce
her resignation. Later, she mused bitterly: "It was treachery with
a smile on its face."
John Major was elected her successor and Margaret Thatcher
returned to the back benches, finally standing down as an MP in
1992 when the Conservatives, against all predictions, were again
returned to power.
Later years
She was elevated to the peerage as Baroness Thatcher of
Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, receiving the Order of the
Garter in 1995.
She wrote two volumes of her memoirs while remaining active in
politics, campaigning against the Maastricht Treaty and
condemning the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
She publicly endorsed William Hague for the Conservative
leadership in 1997 but pointedly failed to speak in favour of his
successor, Iain Duncan Smith.
She continued to attend the House of Lords
She was forced to curtail her activities in 2001 when her health
began to deteriorate. After a series of minor strokes, her doctors
advised her against making public speaking appearances and she
appeared increasingly frail.
She was also suffering from dementia which was affecting her
short-term memory, something her daughter, Carol, would reveal
in 2008.
When her husband Denis - whom she had described as her
"rock" - died in 2003 aged 88, she paid him an emotional tribute.
"Being prime minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be -
you cannot lead from a crowd. But with Denis there I was never
alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend."
A year later she travelled to the US to bid farewell to her political
partner Ronald Reagan, whose funeral took place in Washington
in June 2004.
She continued to appear in public, perhaps most notably when
she unveiled a bronze statue of herself in the House of
Commons, the first time a living former prime minister had been
commemorated in this way.
And she returned to Downing Street. Gordon Brown invited her
for tea, shortly after he became prime minister and she was back
in 2010 as a guest of David Cameron, the new head of a coalition
government.
Legacy
Few politicians have exercised such dominance during their term
in office and few politicians have attracted such strength of
feeling, both for and against.
To her detractors she was the politician who put the free market
above all else and who was willing to allow others to pay the
price for her policies in terms of rising unemployment and social
unrest.
Her supporters hail her for rolling back the frontiers of an
overburdening state, reducing the influence of powerful trades
union leaders and restoring Britain's standing in the world.
She was, above all, that rare thing, a conviction politician who
was prepared to stand by those convictions for good or ill.
Her firm belief that deeply held convictions should never be
compromised by consensus was her great strength and, at the
same time, her greatest weakness.
For many, her philosophy was summed up in a magazine
interview she gave in 1987.
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children
and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it
is the government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I
will go and get a grant to cope with it!'; 'I am homeless, the
government must house me!' and so they are casting their
problems on society and who is society?
"There is no such thing! There are individual men and women
and there are families, and no government can do anything
except through people and people look to themselves first.
"It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look
after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people
have got the entitlements too much in mind without the
obligations."